Mourning To Morning: Yes—it’s Ok

— THE PROBLEM: WHY WE KEEP LOOKING BACK

Life leaves us with memories.

Some of them warm us.

Some of them wound us.

And some of them quietly shape us long after the moment has passed.

Most of us don’t notice how much time we spend replaying our lives.

We replay conversations we wish had gone differently.

We replay relationships that ended — sometimes badly, sometimes suddenly.

We replay decisions we made too fast or opportunities we didn’t take.

We replay seasons when life felt simpler, clearer, or more hopeful than it does now.

The past can start to feel safer than the future — not because it was better, but because it’s familiar.

That’s the part we don’t always admit.

The past doesn’t argue with us.

It doesn’t surprise us.

It doesn’t demand anything new.

It just sits there, replaying on a loop, asking us to visit again.

Some people call this nostalgia.

Some call it regret.

Some call it grief.

But whatever name we give it, the effect is often the same: we stop moving forward.

Sometimes, without realizing it, we begin to live backward.

Not literally — we still show up to work, pay bills, post photos, laugh at jokes.

Inwardly, something stalls. The future becomes something we postpone, not something we expect.

We tell ourselves things like:

“I’ll move forward once I feel better.”

“I’ll start again once I have clarity.”

“I’ll trust again once I’m sure it won’t hurt.”

And without meaning to, we turn waiting into a lifestyle.

Some people are walking around half-alive — not because they’re lazy or broken or faithless — but because something in their past quietly took the driver’s seat.

Before we go any further, let me say something that needs to be said out loud:

If you are mourning today — yes, it’s OK.

It’s OK to grieve what ended.

It’s OK to miss what mattered.

It’s OK to feel the loss of a season, a relationship, a version of yourself you thought would last longer.

Grief is not weakness.

Grief is the price of love.

But grief was never meant to become a permanent address.

There’s a famous literary character named Miss Havisham from Great Expectations.

She was left at the altar on her wedding day. And instead of moving on, she froze time. She kept the wedding cake rotting on the table. She wore the dress for the rest of her life. She lived every day inside the moment of her loss.

Her house decayed.

Her life shrank.

And eventually, so did her heart.

Miss Havisham didn’t die on her wedding day — but she stopped living forward.

And if we’re honest, many of us do the same thing in subtler ways.

We build lives around what didn’t happen.

We define ourselves by what went wrong.

We let a loss become an identity.

We don’t do it intentionally.

We do it carefully.

Quietly.

Reasonably.

And over time, yesterday becomes heavier than tomorrow.

That’s why the question for tonight isn’t a religious one.

It’s a human one.

Are you still living where something ended?

The apostle Paul — who was no stranger to loss, failure, and regret — wrote something honest and disarming:

“Forgetting those things which are behind, and reaching forward to those things which are ahead, I press toward the goal…”

Paul isn’t pretending the past didn’t happen.

He’s saying it no longer gets to decide where he’s going.

That’s an important distinction.

Forgetting doesn’t mean erasing memory.

It means refusing to live there.

Tonight, I want to share three simple truths — not as rules, not as pressure, but as guideposts — for anyone who feels stalled, stuck, or quietly tired of replaying yesterday.

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First: Stop mourning yesterday.

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Second: Start moving forward.

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Third: Stay focused on the goal.

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Not all at once.

Not perfectly.

But intentionally.

Because you cannot heal by staring at the wound forever.

Grief has its place.

It deserves its moment.

But it cannot become your permanent address.

And the good news — whether you consider yourself a person of faith or not — is that morning doesn’t arrive because we force it.

Morning comes because darkness never gets the final word.

If you’re willing to take one honest step forward — not with certainty, not with everything figured out — but simply with openness…

Then this might be the night where mourning begins to give way to morning.

--- WHEN GRIEF STALLS US

There is a difference between grieving and living in grief.

Grief is a response.

Living in grief is a posture.

Grief is something you pass through.

Living in grief is something you build around.

Most of us never decide to get stuck. We just don’t realize when grief quietly overstays its welcome.

In the Bible, there’s a moment like this that feels almost uncomfortably honest. It involves a man named Samuel — a prophet, a leader, someone who genuinely loved God and cared deeply about people.